The MongoDB Perl Driver is being deprecated

Scott L'Hommedieu
August 20, 2019 | Updated: August 27, 2019

A driver is only really useful if people are using it. When the time comes that there are so few people using the driver, with the time of our talented engineers a finite resource, it is essential to focus those engineers on cases where they can benefit the most users. The Perl driver has reached that point, with very few users and even fewer new projects being started, it has now become time to look at how to park development of the driver in a graceful, community-friendly way.

Why now?

We've made this decision using hard data; over the past few years we have surveyed our customer base and talked to companies that use the Perl driver. They've told us how they aren't developing new applications using Perl and have moved these applications into maintenance mode. This has meant that they have few demands for new MongoDB feature to be supported in the Perl driver.

We also looked at support requests and questions in the community, and found no questions about the Perl driver had been asked since 2018 on the mongodb-user list.

Where next?

For new development many of our customers are choosing to use alternatives to Perl such as Python, Go and Node.js, all of which have actively maintained and enhanced MongoDB drivers supporting the latest features.

With that in mind, we are setting out roadmap to ramp down active development and end official support for the Perl Driver. We are deprecating the Perl driver in a final feature release with support for MongoDB 4.2 features (excluding Field Level Encryption).

The next 12 months

This release comes with an announcement that the driver will be officially end-of-life, 12 months after its release and over those 12 months we will only be providing critical/security fixes for the driver until its final sunset. That release is version 2.2.0, details of which are below. This version of the driver will be end-of-lifed and unsupported from August 13, 2020.

As this process takes place, we invite any members of the Perl community who wishes to maintain the driver as a community project to work with us; the code will be available to fork but we will be looking to evaluate any releases done under the project's name on CPAN.

Perl Driver Version 2.2.0

The Perl driver team has made a stable GA release of the MongoDB Perl Driver, version 2.2.0.

Some of the major features of the v2.2.0 release include:

  • Support for MongoDB 4.2 features, including distributed transactions, update command pipelines, and the $merge aggregation stage
  • Retryable reads
  • 'with_transaction' callback API for sessions

See the Changes file for more details.

This article has been updated since initial publication

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